The easy truism, that a good children’s book is a book that’s good for children too, has enough truth in it to ensure that most fiction reviewers are at least open to the genre. But unless we specialise...
We can know Byron better than anyone has ever known him. Leslie Marchand’s edition of the Letters and Journals, which is far more extensive than any previous collection, has now covered...
As I walk down to the shore at daybreak You cross my path, old softstepper, Just by the Tor where we’ve often smelt you. Making tracks for your earth and cubs, Back from the saltmarsh and...
In his moving first novel The Sweet Shop Owner Graham Swift illuminated the history of one man through flashbacks on the last day of that man’s life. Through the succinctly evoked...
That last summer a small stand of bracken leaped from the hillside into our pasture, clearing a four-foot cattle-proof sheep-proof fence. Father cast on the intruder a cold country eye....
It is impossible not to like Matthew Arnold now that we know him so well. There is no stereotyped Victorian sage in this excellent biography, which is a joy to read, nor are there stereotyped...
They flop their big, blunt heads over the wire like dim children penned in hospital cots. Eyes roll, and a silvery iris-petal unfurls to lick the salt from my bare arm. Then each takes it in turn...
At the beginning of Italo Calvino’s first book for six years, an entirely fictional personage named You, the Reader, buys and settles down with a novel which he firmly believes to be the...
It is probable that J.R.R. Tolkien was throughout his life a copious correspondent, but he appears to have been in his midforties before people took to preserving what he had addressed to them....
We have all been told about the demographic shift in the United States from the North-East to the Sun Belt of the South-West; and the commentators on politics have been eager to explain that...
The first few pages of this book declare a general attitude, wholly admirable in combining the firmest commitment to rationality with intellectual humility, that contrasts not only with the...
Black Spring Spring brings the joys of love to me and you. It stimulates the young child-murderer too. Bad News in April 1981 Robert Garioch, the best poet in Scotland, is dead. The wit stops...
If you teach or study literature in a university, the chances are you’ve spent at least some of your time recently arguing with colleagues about the uses and abuses of literary theory. Not...
Relatives with Latin names faces of hide and plume hands of leather and horn eyes like glass you can see through to the depth of evolution where the simple feelings live fear and longing old and...
Walking to our respective graves In superb weather, I trailed a young duke across Green Park. The trousers made some difference. All the same, The conclusion to which I came Was either rich or...
Ice aches and eases underfoot: a luscious pleasure for the solitary walker, where morning flings its shadows, extravagant and pat, across playground and parking-lot. Cars are stunned by a...
‘It is strange,’ Charles Tomlinson writes, ‘to have met the innovators of one’s time only when age had overtaken them.’ The innovators to whom he refers are those...
With ‘nothing else to do but the impossible’, when revolution breaks out in South Africa, Bam and Maureen Smales accept their house servant’s offer of refuge in his tribal...